Some voters navigated last week’s United States elections with help from a large language model that generated output based on verified, nonpartisan information.
What’s new: Perplexity, an AI-powered search engine founded in 2022 by former OpenAI and Meta researchers, launched its Election Information Hub, an AI-enhanced website that combines AI-generated analysis with real-time data. The model provided live updates, summaries, and explanations of key issues in the recent national, state, and local elections in the U.S. (The hub remains live, but it no longer displays information about local contests or delivers detailed results for election-related searches.)
How it works: Perplexity partnered with Associated Press for election news and Democracy Works, a nonprofit that develops technology and data related to democracy. Democracy Works provided an API for information about elections, issues, and polling locations.
- Users could search by candidate, issue, state, district, or postal code. For example, searching a postal code returned AI-generated summaries of local races, measures, or other ballot issues drawn from vetted sources such as Ballotpedia, a nonpartisan clearinghouse for election information. A chatbot window enabled users to ask questions and drill down on citations of information sources.
- Initial testing by The Verge revealed problems with accuracy in AI-generated summaries. These included outdated information (for example, summaries failed to consistently note Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s withdrawal from the presidential election), mistakes in candidate profiles, and mishandling of write-in candidates. Perplexity eventually fixed many of the errors.
Behind the news: While Perplexity courted demand for AI-generated information about the U.S. elections, other search-engine providers took more cautious approaches. You.com offered an election chatbot that focused on vote tallies provided by Decision Desk HQ, an election information broker, rather than information about issues or polling locations. Google and Microsoft Bing emphasized information from vetted sources. Microsoft Copilot and OpenAI (which had launched its SearchGPT service the week before the election) simply declined to answer election-related questions, referring users to other sources of information.
Why it matters: Chatbots are maturing to the point where they can provide fairly trustworthy information in high-stakes decisions like elections. The combination of web search and retrieval-augmented generation contributes to decision support systems that are both personalized and accurate.
We’re thinking: Perfect information is hard to come by in any election. Traditional media, social media, and your uncle’s strongly held opinions all have limitations. Chatbots aren’t perfect either, but when they’re properly designed to avoid biased output and outfitted with high-quality information sources, they can help strengthen users’ choices and voices.